The Accademia Carrara is one of Italy's premier art museums but remains too little known outside the country. The temporary closure and restoration of its galleries, housed in a grand neoclassical building in the North Italian city of Bergamo, has made possible a welcome collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bringing to New York fifteen of the Carrara's masterpieces by Venetian and North Italian painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including Giovanni Bellini's haunting Pietà with the Virgin and Saint John, the predella panels from Lorenzo Lotto's celebrated Martinengo altarpiece, and Orpheus and Eurydice, an ambitious composition from Titian's early career.

The exhibition and accompanying publication illuminate not only the quality of the Accademia Carrara's holdings but also the unique position the museum occupies in the history of art, collecting, and connoisseurship in the northern Italian regions of Lombardy and the Veneto. As the custodian of three superlative, formerly private collections—those of the Bergamo native Count Giacomo Carrara (1714–1796), who founded the institution in the late eighteenth century, Guglielmo Lochis (1789–1859), and the great connoisseur Giovanni Morelli (1826–1891)—the Accademia Carrara has served to transform the collecting practices and artistic pursuits of three individuals into a reflection of the cultural history of Bergamo, a civic-minded vision whose influence extends far beyond the city's borders.

Table of contents

Sponsor's Statement

Director's Foreword and Acknowledgments

The Accademia Carrara and Its Influence in Bergamo and BeyondAndrea Bayer

The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo: Centuries of History, Collecting, and ConnoisseurshipM. Cristina Rodeschini

Bergamo and the Genius of North Italian Renaissance PaintingAndrea Bayer

Plates

List of Plates

About the authors

Andrea Bayer is Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

M. Cristina Rodeschini is Head of the Accademia Carrara and Director of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo.

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Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

The Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, is a jewel among Italian museums and a haven for art lovers. Founded at the end of the eighteenth century by Count Giacomo Carrara and housed in a beautiful Neoclassical building, it contains a range of masterpieces dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. At its core is a group of outstanding pictures from the Renaissance. Because of closure for restoration, it has been possible for the museum to lend to The Metropolitan Museum of Art fifteen masterpieces by Venetian and north Italian painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including works by Bellini, Titian, and Lorenzo Lotto.